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York-said, at the end of last year, "The Franco-French cultural excep–
tion is dead." The language may have been stilted but the ensuing
affaire
was heartfelt and lasts to this day. He's accused of "spitting in
the face of French politicians and cinema professionals." In defense of
cultural exceptionality, President Chirac pontificated, "To consider
works of art and cultural goods as ordinary merchandise is a profound
mental aberration." Hubert Vedrine, the foreign minister and a man
who seizes every opening for anti-Americanism, has said that the French
cannot accept "a culturally uniform world." The campaign against
McDonald's has already found a violent outlet for such unqualified
nationalism. So in the bookshops now are works like
Who is killing
France?, American Totalitarianism,
No
Thanks Uncle Sam, A Strange
Dictatorship,
and many others in that vein. To a question asking, "Who
are the principal enemies of France in the world?" just under one third
replied, "The U.S.A.," in a poll published in
Le Figaro
of April
2, 2002.
Another poll conducted a little earlier by the Pew Research Center
found that 73 percent of the Germans involved thought that President
Bush made decisions based entirely on U.S. interests, 74 percent of the
Italians thought likewise,
79
percent of the British, and 85 percent of the
French.
Continental Europeans have had to discover that the English lan–
guage is a
sine qua non
of modernity. A row erupted in Holland over a
decision to teach university classes in English. But allover continental
Europe scientific and technical work is carried out and published in
English. The French language has lost its international cachet. Algeria
and Vietnam are among former colonies which have jettisoned the
teaching of French from the national school syllabus. A government–
sponsored body exists to promote French under the patronage of Presi–
dent Chirac, but even scraping the barrel to include Poles and other
foreigners, there are hardly more than one hundred million French
speakers today, humiliatingly many times fewer than speakers of Arabic
and even Spanish.
If
England is allowed to claim as its own writers like
V.
S. Naipaul
and Salman Rushdie, then something of its literary tradition survives. A
search of Europe will reveal virtually no novelists or poets capable of
transcending provincialism in order to make the universal appeal which
was the glory of its several literatures. The same is true for composers,
architects, historians, painters, and filmmakers . The arts as a whole in
Europe are reduced to transgression, a phrase we've heard already
today, to little transitory and usually confessional episodes designed not
to illuminate the human condition, but to upset and shock anyone rash
